since all i do is whine about how i never finish posts, here's a really long half of a post
I loved S8 of Supernatural for a lot of reasons, most of which were emphatically the opposite of "profound." A few of them, though, were at least to me kind of a big deal. Most crucially, I think the season did a wonderful job interrogating the show's treatment of sociological difference, which has been...uneven. AKA, the first two parts of POTENTIALLY MANY on why I don't wanna see any of this "purification" bullshit actually going down, because S8 not only builds on but actively improves a lot of what came before. All the distressing...stuff of this show is on the table here, so please read with self-care in mind.
I. A whole new level of freak: an overview of difference on SPN
Accept, for a moment, that there’s a rare genetic abnormality known as an SC gene. On its own, there's no reason for it to be fatal or even injurious to the carrier; however, for various reasons, complicating factors are in effect all but inevitable. Sometimes unmissable complications occur in early childhood; sometimes not. It doesn’t usually manifest as a part of everyday life until young adulthood. It’s speculated - in typical aughts-era mommy-shaming fashion - to be an epigenetic reaction to Something Mom Did. (There’s no reason it couldn’t be from either parent, or even another party a generation or two back, but somehow the only publicized example is ALL THE WOMAN’S FAULT.) Regardless, it can only appear in families from a particular genetic line. I think all of us would agree that the SC trait is immutable, morally neutral, and a salient but not necessarily determinative part of a person’s holistic state of being.
Now accept, for the moment, that experiences associated with the SC condition have a noticeable, usually significant, effect on a person’s interactions with others - that is to say, the SC condition is social as well as biological. Therefore, it’s pertinent that individuals with the SC gene are raised completely in isolation from other individuals with the SC gene. As with any population a few of them are born to people who would be terrible regardless, but most of them come up in families that are ignorant of the whole deal, and a few of them grow up in environments where the SC trait is heavily stigmatized. This last group of individuals has the shit end of the stick in a lot of ways. They’re treated with suspicion and hostility by their families, trained to fear and despise anyone who shows signs of their….tendencies. And since you never know who might have those tendencies, best just not have any contact with anyone who might make them question their belief system.
So let’s say an individual from that last group suffers one or two serious traumas around the point in his life when the SC condition becomes particularly difficult to ignore or hide. And he discovers that his family knew about his condition and decided not to share what they knew with him, because his possession of that condition meant that he could not be trusted to make decisions about what he wanted to do about it. He absorbs the (implied, and later overtly stated) belief that his life is not worth living if his SC-ness becomes it dominant factor. He adopts their attitude that all expressions of his SC-ness must be repressed and denied.
Unsurprisingly, ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Life being long and cruel, he hits the wall on his ability to repress and starts volitionally engaging in SC-specific behavior; however, he's got good reason to keep up the denial. The resulting shame issues cultivate his vulnerability to an abusive, highly destructive relationship, the fallout of which is (over his strenuous objection) blamed on his SC status. His SC status is presumed to undermine his autonomy so completely that he is, against his express wishes, deprived of potentially life-saving medical treatment and forced to undergo extremely risky psychiatric interventions.
Now, I wouldn't blame our SC carrier in the least for internalizing such toxic attitudes and adopting some unhealthy behaviors in order to cope with that. It would make perfect sense if his default mode of dealing with others involved self-imposed isolation when avoidance was at all possible, or International Man of Mystery-level chameleon habits for the times it wasn't. I'd be shocked if he didn't start to think that all of his problems stem from his condition, that his condition must be cured and purged - it's much easier to say that "X discrete trait about me is the problem" than "that which I spent my life construing as love and acceptance has come with a pretty hefty dose of unearned animus because it was easier for the people I love to hate a thing about me than to do a little examination of themselves." But all of that is an (understandable, survival-oriented) adaptation to problematic reactions to the trait. The trait itself is not the problem.
My point, which I hope is clear, is that once you take the loaded word "demon" out of Sam's story, you're left with a crushingly familiar narrative, particularly wrt his relationships with John and especially Dean. Given the specific language and time frame of earlier seasons, the obvious parallel is with families who were (and are, though thankfully in lesser numbers) still sending young gay men and women to foul "reorientation" quackery, or the "love the sinner, hate the sin" socio-religious mindset which holds that individuals are gay by nature and not choice but they are still to be condemned for ever "acting on it." However, one could just as readily point to people who are subjected to weight-related abuse, or unrealistic expectations that they "overcome" or "cure" their disability/neuroatypicality. Regardless, the crux of the matter is, many people are willing to subject vulnerable family members to severe emotional harm and serious long-term risk because they prioritize a fiction of "normalcy" over their loved ones' actual well-being, in a world where people who are different already experience structural dehumanization in all kinds of ways. This phenomenon is pernicious not because its perpetrators are evil, but because usually they are not.
I think it is crucial to explore how and why people - people we're familiar with and might even admire - are capable of rationalizing dehumanizing cruelty toward those closest to them with blatantly eliminationist rhetoric, and calling those rationalizations "morality" or "concern" or even "love." Our reluctance to do so directly is understandable, but the tradeoff for the distance offered by metaphor is clarity. And I think the way that all these markers and verbalizations of this particular dynamic fit together so seamlessly relies on the audience's familiarity with the mechanics of othering within intimate familial groups, and the ease with which a critical mass of viewers seems to have accepted that a target characteristic for that othering can credibly be described as "demonic" is troubling.
Indeed, what I love most about this thread of S4, strangely enough, is its even-handed look at Dean. Dean is not a glassy-eyed zealot, he is not a strawman, he is not a sadistic 'stache-twirling villain searching for reasons to murder his brother, he is not some rando we don't know whose life we don't care about. It is very tempting to Other bigotry and say that it is only done by those who are not only Not Us but are totally incomprehensible to us. No True Scotsman is a logical fallacy for a reason, and it is a particularly dangerous one in part because it leads us to operate backwards - I empathize, sympathize, or affiliate with this person, therefore whatever they do or say cannot be bigotry.* And so we work very hard not to look too closely. S4, in taking that close look, uses that most flatly devastating deconstruction technique known as honesty. Dean is not a monster, he is a person who does a thing we might (but ought not) describe as "monstrous" when he says that he will not prevent Sam's death if "at least he dies human." Dean's assertion that his hostility toward Sam's difference outweighs Sam's right to survival, reflexively crueler than any thought in Sam's demon-blood-addled brain, is devastatingly human. But that doesn't make it right.
II. I mean, if that's what this is: religion, sexuality, and taboo
Unfortunately, where S4 was refreshingly non-normative about difference, S5 was in many ways regressive. To analyze parts of S4/5 of SPN, I depart a bit from my usual "author is boxed" presumption, because of course Chuck breaks the fourth wall a bit as an authorial avatar. I think he's well-developed enough as a character that he certainly can sustain an interpretation that he is as unreliable a narrator as any, but that is almost assuredly reading against intent. This tells me that the text is operating on the assumption that I believe Sam's choice to ingest a particular substance is not "morally neutral if possibly ill-considered," but something that "you've gotta know [i]s wrong." The best thing I can say about that is that it's a tell versus show problem - I was being shown a fascinating story about identity, and resistance, and ethical use of reappropriated power, and the complex cognitive processes that allow people to convince themselves that you are a good person if you love someone while hating what they are; I was then told bullshit moralized JUST-SAY-NOing, by the authorial avatar.
Being a believer that the author is boxed, or at the very least off playing skee-ball, I would usually just say that's dicey framing supporting a really heavy story but nothing needs to be ignored to go with the reading that isn't horribly gross, which is that Chuck is a character with flaws and biases and limited knowledge and he just said something wrong. Except for fucking Swan Song and its implication that Chuck is God. Aside from how I found him aesthetically intrusive (reason enough) and that my explanation for him was way cooler, it has some terrible implications in this context.
Because: real people are still told by real religious leaders who claim to speak for the Abrahamic God the exact same bullshit that Chuck spewed at Sam. Many of these real people spend their real lives barely treading water psychologically, trying to BE an X but not ACT ON their X-ness because GOD SAYS it's WRONG. Tragically, a few of these real people do end their own lives at least in part because of it. Therefore S5, culminating in "God" himself endorsing the way Sam learns his lesson about successfully repressing his dirty urges until he flings himself into Hell at his shame (but only after asking for permission from the Normals who tried to kill him a year ago), is exceptionally irresponsible.
I use the relatively mild word "irresponsible" because I really think this is the kind of arsenic-in-the-drinking-water shit that we're all socialized to accept and endorse unthinkingly. I have absolutely no reason to believe Kripke et al planned to take the stance that It Shouldn't Get Better, You Fucking Freak. But the creators of this show are storytellers, which means it is their job to interrogate their story and know what it's saying, and they didn't do that here, IMO to deeply disturbing effect. Hence: irresponsible.
The other shot I'm not taking is the idea that this flaw - granted, a very serious one - makes THE SHOW THE WORST EVAR, OMG, though this is serious shit and of course I wouldn't find fault with anyone who was triggered enough to have that response. To my mind, S1-3 laid a solid foundation for the exploration of difference, and S4 did things I've never seen any other show do in exploring the toxicity of bias in close relationships. S5 dropping the ball would've ruined the show if it had been, as planned, the definitive statement on the show; however, all three subsequent seasons have been relentlessly aware of a lot of these problems. That's 1/8 shitty, 3/8 okay, and 1/2 fantastic, which is a hell of a lot better than most shows' track records with handling of difference. But this demonstrates precedent for my worry about all the incredible work S8 did with exploring Sam's internalization of this bias by having him find the incomplete trials have nevertheless "cured" him of something that doesn't need curing.
*S8 handled Dean's potential queerness far better than even the most enthusiastic supporters of such a storyline seem to appreciate. IMO, explicitly identifying the character as gay/bi without in some way addressing his seasons-long history as the "family values" enforcer, defender of Normalcy against the ~hidden threat of ungodly deviance among us, would be little more than an object lesson in the down side of tokenism. But the way those final episodes of the season heavily emphasized those two things together - (1) that there are people who are not heterosexual in the world and Dean might be one of them and (2) that Dean's ctrl+F'd Love Wins Out attitude toward his ~freak brother had serious repercussions for Sam - suggests to me that someone on board has made a good-faith commitment to really do right by the character.
IDK this post is a lot less Dean-skeptical than I like to be, probably because my big issue with the character is less in the flaws (because lol) and more in the way that I worry all of this toxic coded stuff is flying under the radar. So I really, REALLY hope I didn't come across as condoning his bullshit and PLEASE tell me if that's not clear. NONE of this should be construed in any way as an excuse for the way he treats the people around him.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/301433.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.
I. A whole new level of freak: an overview of difference on SPN
Accept, for a moment, that there’s a rare genetic abnormality known as an SC gene. On its own, there's no reason for it to be fatal or even injurious to the carrier; however, for various reasons, complicating factors are in effect all but inevitable. Sometimes unmissable complications occur in early childhood; sometimes not. It doesn’t usually manifest as a part of everyday life until young adulthood. It’s speculated - in typical aughts-era mommy-shaming fashion - to be an epigenetic reaction to Something Mom Did. (There’s no reason it couldn’t be from either parent, or even another party a generation or two back, but somehow the only publicized example is ALL THE WOMAN’S FAULT.) Regardless, it can only appear in families from a particular genetic line. I think all of us would agree that the SC trait is immutable, morally neutral, and a salient but not necessarily determinative part of a person’s holistic state of being.
Now accept, for the moment, that experiences associated with the SC condition have a noticeable, usually significant, effect on a person’s interactions with others - that is to say, the SC condition is social as well as biological. Therefore, it’s pertinent that individuals with the SC gene are raised completely in isolation from other individuals with the SC gene. As with any population a few of them are born to people who would be terrible regardless, but most of them come up in families that are ignorant of the whole deal, and a few of them grow up in environments where the SC trait is heavily stigmatized. This last group of individuals has the shit end of the stick in a lot of ways. They’re treated with suspicion and hostility by their families, trained to fear and despise anyone who shows signs of their….tendencies. And since you never know who might have those tendencies, best just not have any contact with anyone who might make them question their belief system.
So let’s say an individual from that last group suffers one or two serious traumas around the point in his life when the SC condition becomes particularly difficult to ignore or hide. And he discovers that his family knew about his condition and decided not to share what they knew with him, because his possession of that condition meant that he could not be trusted to make decisions about what he wanted to do about it. He absorbs the (implied, and later overtly stated) belief that his life is not worth living if his SC-ness becomes it dominant factor. He adopts their attitude that all expressions of his SC-ness must be repressed and denied.
Unsurprisingly, ignoring it doesn't make it go away. Life being long and cruel, he hits the wall on his ability to repress and starts volitionally engaging in SC-specific behavior; however, he's got good reason to keep up the denial. The resulting shame issues cultivate his vulnerability to an abusive, highly destructive relationship, the fallout of which is (over his strenuous objection) blamed on his SC status. His SC status is presumed to undermine his autonomy so completely that he is, against his express wishes, deprived of potentially life-saving medical treatment and forced to undergo extremely risky psychiatric interventions.
Now, I wouldn't blame our SC carrier in the least for internalizing such toxic attitudes and adopting some unhealthy behaviors in order to cope with that. It would make perfect sense if his default mode of dealing with others involved self-imposed isolation when avoidance was at all possible, or International Man of Mystery-level chameleon habits for the times it wasn't. I'd be shocked if he didn't start to think that all of his problems stem from his condition, that his condition must be cured and purged - it's much easier to say that "X discrete trait about me is the problem" than "that which I spent my life construing as love and acceptance has come with a pretty hefty dose of unearned animus because it was easier for the people I love to hate a thing about me than to do a little examination of themselves." But all of that is an (understandable, survival-oriented) adaptation to problematic reactions to the trait. The trait itself is not the problem.
My point, which I hope is clear, is that once you take the loaded word "demon" out of Sam's story, you're left with a crushingly familiar narrative, particularly wrt his relationships with John and especially Dean. Given the specific language and time frame of earlier seasons, the obvious parallel is with families who were (and are, though thankfully in lesser numbers) still sending young gay men and women to foul "reorientation" quackery, or the "love the sinner, hate the sin" socio-religious mindset which holds that individuals are gay by nature and not choice but they are still to be condemned for ever "acting on it." However, one could just as readily point to people who are subjected to weight-related abuse, or unrealistic expectations that they "overcome" or "cure" their disability/neuroatypicality. Regardless, the crux of the matter is, many people are willing to subject vulnerable family members to severe emotional harm and serious long-term risk because they prioritize a fiction of "normalcy" over their loved ones' actual well-being, in a world where people who are different already experience structural dehumanization in all kinds of ways. This phenomenon is pernicious not because its perpetrators are evil, but because usually they are not.
I think it is crucial to explore how and why people - people we're familiar with and might even admire - are capable of rationalizing dehumanizing cruelty toward those closest to them with blatantly eliminationist rhetoric, and calling those rationalizations "morality" or "concern" or even "love." Our reluctance to do so directly is understandable, but the tradeoff for the distance offered by metaphor is clarity. And I think the way that all these markers and verbalizations of this particular dynamic fit together so seamlessly relies on the audience's familiarity with the mechanics of othering within intimate familial groups, and the ease with which a critical mass of viewers seems to have accepted that a target characteristic for that othering can credibly be described as "demonic" is troubling.
Indeed, what I love most about this thread of S4, strangely enough, is its even-handed look at Dean. Dean is not a glassy-eyed zealot, he is not a strawman, he is not a sadistic 'stache-twirling villain searching for reasons to murder his brother, he is not some rando we don't know whose life we don't care about. It is very tempting to Other bigotry and say that it is only done by those who are not only Not Us but are totally incomprehensible to us. No True Scotsman is a logical fallacy for a reason, and it is a particularly dangerous one in part because it leads us to operate backwards - I empathize, sympathize, or affiliate with this person, therefore whatever they do or say cannot be bigotry.* And so we work very hard not to look too closely. S4, in taking that close look, uses that most flatly devastating deconstruction technique known as honesty. Dean is not a monster, he is a person who does a thing we might (but ought not) describe as "monstrous" when he says that he will not prevent Sam's death if "at least he dies human." Dean's assertion that his hostility toward Sam's difference outweighs Sam's right to survival, reflexively crueler than any thought in Sam's demon-blood-addled brain, is devastatingly human. But that doesn't make it right.
II. I mean, if that's what this is: religion, sexuality, and taboo
Unfortunately, where S4 was refreshingly non-normative about difference, S5 was in many ways regressive. To analyze parts of S4/5 of SPN, I depart a bit from my usual "author is boxed" presumption, because of course Chuck breaks the fourth wall a bit as an authorial avatar. I think he's well-developed enough as a character that he certainly can sustain an interpretation that he is as unreliable a narrator as any, but that is almost assuredly reading against intent. This tells me that the text is operating on the assumption that I believe Sam's choice to ingest a particular substance is not "morally neutral if possibly ill-considered," but something that "you've gotta know [i]s wrong." The best thing I can say about that is that it's a tell versus show problem - I was being shown a fascinating story about identity, and resistance, and ethical use of reappropriated power, and the complex cognitive processes that allow people to convince themselves that you are a good person if you love someone while hating what they are; I was then told bullshit moralized JUST-SAY-NOing, by the authorial avatar.
Being a believer that the author is boxed, or at the very least off playing skee-ball, I would usually just say that's dicey framing supporting a really heavy story but nothing needs to be ignored to go with the reading that isn't horribly gross, which is that Chuck is a character with flaws and biases and limited knowledge and he just said something wrong. Except for fucking Swan Song and its implication that Chuck is God. Aside from how I found him aesthetically intrusive (reason enough) and that my explanation for him was way cooler, it has some terrible implications in this context.
Because: real people are still told by real religious leaders who claim to speak for the Abrahamic God the exact same bullshit that Chuck spewed at Sam. Many of these real people spend their real lives barely treading water psychologically, trying to BE an X but not ACT ON their X-ness because GOD SAYS it's WRONG. Tragically, a few of these real people do end their own lives at least in part because of it. Therefore S5, culminating in "God" himself endorsing the way Sam learns his lesson about successfully repressing his dirty urges until he flings himself into Hell at his shame (but only after asking for permission from the Normals who tried to kill him a year ago), is exceptionally irresponsible.
I use the relatively mild word "irresponsible" because I really think this is the kind of arsenic-in-the-drinking-water shit that we're all socialized to accept and endorse unthinkingly. I have absolutely no reason to believe Kripke et al planned to take the stance that It Shouldn't Get Better, You Fucking Freak. But the creators of this show are storytellers, which means it is their job to interrogate their story and know what it's saying, and they didn't do that here, IMO to deeply disturbing effect. Hence: irresponsible.
The other shot I'm not taking is the idea that this flaw - granted, a very serious one - makes THE SHOW THE WORST EVAR, OMG, though this is serious shit and of course I wouldn't find fault with anyone who was triggered enough to have that response. To my mind, S1-3 laid a solid foundation for the exploration of difference, and S4 did things I've never seen any other show do in exploring the toxicity of bias in close relationships. S5 dropping the ball would've ruined the show if it had been, as planned, the definitive statement on the show; however, all three subsequent seasons have been relentlessly aware of a lot of these problems. That's 1/8 shitty, 3/8 okay, and 1/2 fantastic, which is a hell of a lot better than most shows' track records with handling of difference. But this demonstrates precedent for my worry about all the incredible work S8 did with exploring Sam's internalization of this bias by having him find the incomplete trials have nevertheless "cured" him of something that doesn't need curing.
*S8 handled Dean's potential queerness far better than even the most enthusiastic supporters of such a storyline seem to appreciate. IMO, explicitly identifying the character as gay/bi without in some way addressing his seasons-long history as the "family values" enforcer, defender of Normalcy against the ~hidden threat of ungodly deviance among us, would be little more than an object lesson in the down side of tokenism. But the way those final episodes of the season heavily emphasized those two things together - (1) that there are people who are not heterosexual in the world and Dean might be one of them and (2) that Dean's ctrl+F'd Love Wins Out attitude toward his ~freak brother had serious repercussions for Sam - suggests to me that someone on board has made a good-faith commitment to really do right by the character.
IDK this post is a lot less Dean-skeptical than I like to be, probably because my big issue with the character is less in the flaws (because lol) and more in the way that I worry all of this toxic coded stuff is flying under the radar. So I really, REALLY hope I didn't come across as condoning his bullshit and PLEASE tell me if that's not clear. NONE of this should be construed in any way as an excuse for the way he treats the people around him.
This entry was originally posted at http://pocochina.dreamwidth.org/301433.html. Leave a comment here, or there using OpenID.